Can't Get you Out of my Head- Part 6

 

See here for my review of Part 5: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2021/05/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head-part-5.html. Part 6 is called: Are we the Pigeon or Are we the Dancer?. This is the final episode of Can't Get You Out of my Head. See here for Part 6: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p093x1c1/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head-series-1-6-part-six-are-we-pigeon-or-are-we-dancer and: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_C4Dn2-Pk3I.
In this two-hour concluding episode, we find out how the story ends, with the exception of Jiang Qing; we already know how it ended for her. Following World War II many prominent thinkers turned towards the idea of the individual rather than us being seen as a collective of any kind. Earlier episodes discussed Ayn Rand who was the most prominent of these pioneers. There was a photography exhibition in the 1950's called The Family of Man that presented five hundred and three photographs from sixty-three countries of ordinary people. The idea was that everybody could use the information in them information to build their own life story. Another person who questioned official reality was Tupac Shakur, the famous rapper. His mother Afeni Shakur was a leading figure in the Black Panther movement and had her own remarkable experience of the depth and normality of fraudulent life-hacking, as we've seen previously. The programme shows a video of Tupac in 1988 as a high schoolboy showing extraordinary awareness. Later on in his career, he wrote songs about the destructiveness of drug addiction. He thought that the aggression shown by street gangs in the USA could be transformed into something positive, a way of striking back against the oppressive political class. Yet this unlocked a terrible paradox in which his own success seemed to indicate that he had joined the establishment. However more and more people, especially black Americans, began to understand the "conspiracy theory" that crack cocaine was a biochemical psychological weapon being used by the CIA against American citizens. That is true actually and President Bill Clinton was involved. Mark Devlin questions the randomness of Tupac's death in a supposed drive by shooting in 1996, see: https://www.mixcloud.com/djmarkdevlin/good-vibrations-podcast-vol-90-sonia-poulton-tupac-biggie-20th-anniversaries/. The narrative then moves to the Middle East. There in Saudi Arabia was born Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian. His ethnic origin meant that he was a second class citizen in the oil-soaked desert nation and as a result this led him to become angry. He saw the Saudi elite as just pretending to be Muslims while obsessed with money and materialism. Then, rather like Sayyid Qutb, he promoted Islamism to give people meaning to their lives. He became a jihadist and fought for the Taliban in Afghanistan. There he suffered a head wound in 1991 during the war to oust the post-Soviet socialist regime in Kabul. He was left with brain damage that affected his memory and ability to organize his thoughts. He was famously captured by the CIA and given "enhanced interrogation" by psychologists, including water boarding. This combined with his brain damage meant he just began giving out random statements, but they were taken seriously by the US government and adopted as policy because they exaggerated the public image of the terrorist threat which was used to give the state enormous power during the first decade of this century. He was oddly similar to Tupac Shakur in his idea that a life without meaning is a worthless life. It's not a new idea; in fact it can be found in that pivotal moment in history, the French Revolution. However, ironically, at the very moment Tupac and Zubaydah were rediscovering this idea; scientists in the West were denying not only the existence of life's meaning, but the existence of the very thing that understands it, the self. Dr Michael Gazzaniga is a psychiatrist who proposed curing severe epilepsy by severing the corpus callosum, the bridge between the two hemispheres of the brain. The strange effects this had led him to conclude that there is no single conscious self; just a series of selves organized by a "storyteller" which can be found in the left brain. As Curtis puts it: "Human consciousness was being sidelined". Gazzaniga's theory has been criticized by numerous other thinkers. This documentary is an excellent introduction to the subject, see: https://vimeo.com/575140944 and: https://vimeo.com/575144116.
 
There's an amusing clip in the programme of Google's headquarters in 1998, when the company was founded. Believe it or not, it was in a garage in the home of its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It's obviously moved upmarket since then. In a late '90's interview, Brin says that he wants to make the world a better place, just like in the photo exhibition fifty years earlier. Brin truly believed that his goal was to make information accessible to all completely freely and without censorship... the irony is not lost on me. Following the bursting of the Silicon Valley bubble in 2000, Google made a deal with the devil; sponsorship in exchange for their users' information being put into a database. In some instances this was just for relatively benign advertising purposes, like I have experienced myself, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2013/07/big-spammer-is-watching-you.html; but it was only a matter of time before intelligence services came knocking at their door. What used to be harmless browsing cookies became CCTV on our selves. Children's dolls, cleaning robots and even sex toys were hooked up to a system that allowed authorities to snoop on our lives, as Edward Snowden has warned us of, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2017/03/vault-7.html. More computer experts rose from the woodpile like Geoffrey Hinton and BF Skinner. Hinton is the great-great-grandson of George Boole whom we met in episode one. Together they imagined a world in which society could be governed by computers called "neural nets", modelled on the human brain and be able to learn new things independently. Hinton called it "Vector-World" and Skinner wrote an allegorical novel about such a future utopia called Walden Two. In this system, humans were stripped of their humanity and would be regarded like pigeons pecking at lights to be rewarded with food in the classic Pavlovian response experiments. Hinton wrote a programme that could be used to calculate people's credit status. The USA hasn't developed that further, but another country has. In China an official called Bo Xilai came up with a similar idea to the other people Curtis has covered, including Leo Strauss, that obsessive hedonism and an obsession with meaningless pleasure leads to societal collapse. However the Chinese regime were already adopting the methods of Hinton and Skinner to create their "social credit" system. Bo Xilai was arrested on a charge of fraud and embezzlement after his businessparter Neil Haywood was mysteriously found dead. When he went to trial thousands of protesters assembled outside because it seemed obvious that Bo Xilai was framed while trying to expose the very crime he was accused of. Russia in the 1990's was a terrible place. The organized criminals called "oligarchs" had plundered the corpse of the Soviet Union and now were effectively running the country. In 2000 the submarine Kursk sank with the loss of all on board while Putin used the opportunity to set himself up as a nationalist populist, blaming the oligarchs for the tragedy, or so we're told. An opposition politician called Alexei Navalny emerged calling Putin's government "a party of crooks and thieves". Curtis' documentary presents a very cynical view of Vladimir Putin. However, like so many individuals in history, maybe he doesn't deserve the label of hatred that has been stuck onto him. These HPANWO Radio shows tell a different story about both Putin and Navalny, see: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.com/2020/11/programme-395-podcast-nick-kollerstrom.html and: https://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.com/2021/03/programme-410-podcast-nick-kollerstrom.html.

Adam Curtis compares Hinton's Vector-World to conspiracy theories. In his view, people like me mimic perfectly the mindless building of connections between different pieces of unconnected information in the same way these computer programmes do. He demonstrates how Google's DeepDream program can find pictures of dogs in random patterns in the same way we build our own mental pictures of the world around us, even where no such picture exists objectively. This takes us back to episode one and the prank played by Kerry Thornley and Greg Hill. I suspect it has also inspired Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum, about a fake conspiracy theory being generated by people's delusions reinforcing themselves in a feedback exaggeration spiral. Obviously I reject this notion because I believe many conspiracy theories to be factually correct; and indeed history has verified that position. One of the last things Tupac Shakur did before his suspicious death was a performance called "Killuminati" which was a repudiation of conspiratorial ideas. My complete objection to this can be found here: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2013/11/illuminati-pamphlet.html. 2016 was a massive upset to the elite. See: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2019/10/brexit-portal.html and: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2021/01/donald-trump-portal.html. Adam Curtis strangely rejects Neil Sanders' view that the whole thing was engineered by Cambridge Analytica. I had supposed up till then that the two were on the same side over this. Many social psychologists, or should I say mindbenders, began to reassess everything they had thought true and wonder if humans are harder to manipulate than they had previously thought. We are, and they ain't seen nothing yet! "Into this fragile structure came a catastrophe: Covid." says Adam Curtis. He predicts four futures and I disagree with his very premise about them all. He regards the supposed "election" of Joe Biden a "return to stability"... I don't need to repeat what I think of that. There may be an increase of populism and maybe another 2016-like situation; hope so! There may be more control and surveillance; and Curtis rightly fears the expansion of the social credit system into the rest of the world. On the other hand, there may be a third future that nobody has imagined yet that will be better than both of the other two options. I think that this fourth option will in some way be connected to the second, but Curtis is quite right to cite the late anthropologist and activist David Graeber with the quotation that launched the entire series of six episodes: "The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently". According to Curtis, both QAnon and Russiagate served the same purpose, to give the government an excuse why they can't find a solution the real social problems in this world. No, Q and Trump are not that at all. They are the solution. They are the means to end Illuminati rule on this planet forever in a way Adam Curtis doesn't grasp and whose foundation he has rejected to his discredit.

See here for more background: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2016/10/hypernormalisation.html.